This past December marked three years since I joined Stitch Fix Engineering. In that short time, I’ve witnessed the bulk of the growth that we’ve experienced as a company since our founding. For example, in December 2014 there were roughly 10 engineers and now we number nearly 100. It was a time when those of us at our SF headquarters used to be able to sit around a small conference room table for our all hands meetings. Similarly, we needed just a slightly larger table when our remote engineers (roughly 50% of our team) came to SF for a week during our once-quarterly Engineering summits.

On the Stitch Fix Algorithms team, we’ve always been in awe of what professional stylists are able to do, especially when it comes to knowing a customer’s size on sight. It’s a magical experience to walk into a suit shop, have the professional shopping assistant look you over and without taking a measurement say, “you’re probably a 38, let’s try this one,” and pull out a perfect-fitting jacket. While this sort of experience has been impossible with traditional eCommerce, at Stitch Fix we’re making it a reality.

I’ve been lax in updating the “Patterns of Service-oriented Architecture” series, so here’s a new one on a time-honored and critical technique: Database Transactions. This is a powerful feature of most SQL databases that allows you to apply a series of changes to the database in an “all or nothing” type of approach.

Recently Increment published an issue about what it is like being a developer at a number of great companies like Fastly, Lyft, and DigitalOcean. We thought it would be fun to create a blog post answering the same questions about what it’s like at Stitch Fix.

Counting and tensor decompositions are elegant and straightforward techniques. But these methods are grossly underepresented in business contexts. In this post we factorized an example made up of word skipgrams occurring within documents to arrive at word and document vectors simultaneously. This kind of analysis is effective, simple, and yields powerful concepts.